Fake It Til You Make It

I have observed various instances of magical thinking in mainstream culture, especially here, which I find problematical. Although it’s not my ambition to disabuse anyone of magical thinking, which extends far beyond, say, religious thought, I was somewhat taken aback at the suggestion found in the comic at this link (not embedded). For those not familiar with Questionable Content (one of two online comics I read regularly), the comic presents an extended cast of characters, mostly in their early 20s, living in a contemporary New England college town. Those characters are supplemented by a few older parents and lots of AIs (in robot bodies). The AIs are not particularly futuristic but are simply accepted as a normal (if curious) part of the world of the comic. Major story arcs involve characters and AIs (the AIs are characters, I suppose) in the process of discovering and establishing themselves as they (the humans, anyway) transition into early adulthood. There are no great political themes or intrusions into life in a college town. Rather, the comic is largely about acceptance of difference. Often, that means washing away meaningful difference in the name of banal tolerance. Real existential struggle is almost entirely absent.

In the linked comic, a new character comes along and offers advice to an established character struggling with sexual attractions and orientation. The dialogue includes this exchange:

Character A: If tarot or astrology or religion halps you make sense of the world and your place in it, then why not use them?
Character B: But they’re not real. [emphasis in original]
Character A: It doesn’t matter, if you use them constructively!

There it is in a nutshell: believe whatever you want if it, um, halps. I’ve always felt that being wrong (i.e., using unreal or make-believe things) was a sufficient injunction against anchoring oneself to notions widely known to be false. Besides, isn’t it often remarked that the biggest fool is one who fools himself? (Fiction as a combination of entertainment and building a worldview is quite normative, but it’s understood as fiction, or to a lesser degree, as life imitating art and its inverse. Exceptions abound, which are regarded as psychopathy.) The instruction in that dialogue (part object lesson, part lesson in cognition) is not that it’s OK to make mistakes but that knowingly believing something false has worthwhile advantages.

Surveying examples where promulgating false beliefs have constructive and destructive effects is too large a project. Well short of that, nasty categories include fraud, gaslighting, and propaganda, which are criminal in many cases and ought to be in most others (looking at you, MSM! — or not, since I neither trust nor watch). One familiar benevolent category is expressed in the phrase fake it til you make it, often recommended to overcome a lack of confidence. Of course, a swindle is also known as a confidence game (or by its diminutive, a con), so beware overconfidence when asked by another to pay for something (e.g., tarot or astrology readings), take risks, or accept an ideology without question.

As philosophy, willful adoption of falsity for its supposed benefits is half-baked. Though impossible to quantify, my suspicion is that instances of positive outcomes are overbalanced by negative ones. Maybe living in a constructed reality or self-reinforcing fantasy is what people want. The comic discussed is certainly in line with that approach. However, while we dither and delude ourselves with happy, aspirational stories based on silliness, the actual world around us, including all the human institutions that used to serve us but no longer do, falls to tatters. Is it better going through life and eventually to one’s grave refusing to see that reality? Should childlike wonder and innocence be retained in spite of what is easily observable just by poking one’s head up and dismissing comforting lies? Decide for yourself.

Let’s Be Evil, pt. 1

Evil exists in the world. History and current events both bear this out amply. Pseudo-philosophers might argue that, like emotions and other immaterial sensations, good and evil are merely reified concepts, meaning they are human constructs with no palpable external reality. Go tell that to victims of evildoers. Human suffering can’t be anonymized, rationalized, or philosophized away quite so handily.

It was sort of refreshing, back in the day, when Google’s motto and/or corporate code of conduct was simple: “Don’t Be Evil.” It acknowledged the potential for being or becoming evil (like any of the Bigs: Big Tobacco, Big Soda, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Agriculture, etc.) and presumably aspired to resist obvious temptations. That was then (from 2000 to 2018), this is now (2021 until death take us — soon enough, I fear). But like all entities possessed of absurd levels of wealth and power, Google (now reorganized as a subsidiary of Alphabet, but who actually refers to it that way?) and its Silicon Valley brethren have succumbed to temptation and become straight-up evil.

One might charitably assess this development as something unbidden, unanticipated, and unexpected, but that’s no excuse, really. I certainly don’t envy celebrity executives experiencing difficulty resulting from having created unmanageable behemoths loosed on both public and polity unable to recognize beastly fangs until already clamped on their necks. As often occurs, dystopian extrapolations are explored in fiction, sometimes satirically. The dénouement of the HBO show Silicon Valley depicts tech mogul wannabes succeeding in creating an AI (or merely a sophisticated algorithm? doesn’t matter …) that would in time become far too powerful in blind execution of its inner imperative. In the show, characters recognize what they had done and kill their own project rather than allow it to destroy the world. In reality, multiple developers of computer tech platforms (and their embedded dynamic, including the wildly unhelpful albeit accurate term algorithm) lacked the foresight to anticipate awful downstream effects of their brainchildren. Yet now that those effects are manifesting recognizably, these corporations continue to operate and wreak havoc.

Silicon Valley shows a extended software development period of bungling ineptitude punctuated by brilliant though momentary breakthroughs. Characters are smart, flawed people laughably unable to get out of the way of their own success. The pièce de résistance was yoking one so-called “learning machine” to another and initiating what would become a runaway doomsday process (either like ecological collapse, building slowly the making the biosphere uninhabitable all at once, or like the gray goo problem, progressively “processing” biomass at the molecular level until all that remains is lifeless goo). It was a final act of bumbling that demanded the characters’ principled, ethical response before the window of opportunity closed. Real Silicon Valley tech platforms are in the (ongoing) process of rending the social fabric, which is no laughing matter. The issue du jour surrounds free speech and its inverse censorship. More broadly, real Silicon Valley succeeded in gaming human psychology for profit in at least two aspects (could be more as yet unrecognized): (1) mining behavioral data as an exploitable resource, and (2) delivering inexhaustible streams of extremely divisive content (not its own) to drive persistent engagement with its platforms. Yoked together, they operate to drive society mad, and yet, mounting evidence of this development has not produced even an inkling that maybe the damned doomsday devices ought to be shut off. As with the environment, we operate with freedom enough to destroy ourselves. Instead, politicians issue stunningly ineffectual calls for regulation or break-up of monopolies. In the meantime, ever more absurd wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few executives who have clearly punted and decided “let’s be evil.” No restraints on their behavioral experimentation across whole societies exist.

Much more to say on this topic in additional parts to come.

Citizenship in the Community

Something in an online discussion brought me back to my days as a Boy Scout. (No, not that, with your nasty, nasty assumptions.) It was one of the first merit badges I earned: Citizenship in the Community (link to PDF). I can’t remember any of the content anymore (haven’t yet consulted the PDF), and indeed, looking back with the advantage of several decades of hindsight, I have a hard time imagining any of the (morality? ethics?) lessons learned back then having had much durable impact despite remembering an emerging confidence and awareness (a commonplace delusion of youth) of my position within the community. Still, I appreciate having had many Boy Scout character-building experiences, which led to simple and enduring understandings of ideals such as honor, duty, preparedness, service, forbearance, shouldering hardships, and perhaps most of all, accepting responsibility for others, particularly those younger and weaker. (I’m not claiming to be any sort of paragon of virtue. Cynicism and misanthropy may have wrecked that aspiration.) I never served in the military, but I surmise others learn similar lessons slightly later in life when more readily absorbed and not so easily forgotten. In the past decade plus, some may seek these lessons through participation in endurance sports or martial arts (if not distorted by bad instruction like in Cobra Kai), though the focus outward (i.e., toward community and mutual reliance) may not be as strong.

The subject came up in a discussion of participants in small-scale democracy, something I’ve always known is messy, unrewarding, thankless, and sometimes costly yet still necessary to be a good citizen contributing to one’s community. Many adults get their first taste of local democratic groups (read: self-governing) through parent groups like the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). Or maybe it’s a performing arts organization, home owner’s association, church council, social work hotline, self-help group, or cooperative. Doesn’t matter which. (Political activism and organizing might be something quite different. Hard to say.) Groups run on the good will and dedication of volunteered time and skills for the benefit of members of the community. As with any population, there are always free riders: those who contribute nothing but enjoy and/or extract benefits. In fact, if everyone were integrally involved, organizational complexity would become unmanageable. If activities of such groups seem like a piece of cake or vaguely utopian, just join one and see how different character types behave. Lotta dead wood in such organization. Moreover, power mongers and self-aggrandizers often take over small-scale democracies and run them like private fiefdoms. Or difficult policy and finance discussions divide otherwise like-minded groups into antagonists. As I said, it’s a decidedly messy undertaking.

Members of the community outside of the executive group (typically a board of directors) also have legitimate interests. Maybe community members attend meetings to keep informed or weigh in online with unconstructive complaints and criticisms (or even mockery and trolling) but then refuse to contribute anything worthwhile. Indeed, boards often have difficulty recruiting new officers or participants because no one wants to take on responsibility and face potential criticism directed at them. I’ve also seen boards settle into the same few folks year after year whose opinions and leadership grow stale and calcifies.

Writ large, leadership skills learned through citizenship in the community rise to the equivalents of Boy Scout merit badges Citizenship in the Nation and Citizenship in the World (no links but searchable). Skills deployed at those strata would arguably require even greater wherewithal and wisdom, with stakes potentially being much higher. Regrettably, having just passed through an election cycle and change of leadership in the U.S., my dour assessment is that leadership has failed miserably at multiple issues. The two most significant involve how we fail to organize society for the benefit of all, namely, economic equality and resource sustainability. Once market forces came to bear on social organization and corporate entities grew too large to be rooted in community service anymore, greed and corruption destroyed high-minded ideals. More self-aggrandizers and careerists than ever (no names, fill in the blanks, they’re all famous — or infamous) rose to the tops of organizations and administrations, especially politics, news media, and the punditry. Their logical antidotes are routinely and ruthlessly disenfranchised and/or ignored. The lasting results are financial inequality run amok and unsustainable resource addictions (energy mostly) that are toxifying the environment and reducing the landscape to ruin and inhabitability. (Perpetual war is a third institutional failure that could be halted almost immediately if moral clarity were somehow to appear.) It’s all out there, plain to see, yet continues to mount because of execrable leadership. Some argue it’s really a problem with human nature, a kind of original stain on our souls that can never be erased and so should be forgiven or at least understood (and rationalized away) within a large context. I’m not yet ready to excuse national and world leaders. Their culpability is criminal.

Feeding the Frenzy (redux)

Black Friday has over the past decades become the default kickoff of annual consumer madness associated with the holiday season and its gift-giving tradition. Due to the pandemic, this year has been considerably muted in comparison to other years — at least in terms of crowds. Shopping has apparently moved online fairly aggressively, which is an entirely understandable result of everyone being locked down and socially distanced. (Lack of disposable income ought to be a factor, too, but American consumers have shown remarkable willingness to take on substantial debt when able in support of mere lifestyle.) Nevertheless, my inbox has been deluged over the past week with incessant Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertising. Predictably, retailers continue feeding the frenzy.

Uncharacteristically, perhaps, this state of affairs is not the source of outrage on my part. I recognize that we live in a consumerist, capitalist society that will persist in buying and selling activities even in the face of increasing hardship. I’m also cynical enough to expect retailers (and the manufacturers they support, even if those manufacturers are Chinese) to stoke consumer desire through advertising, promotions, and discount sales. It’s simply what they do. Why stop now? Thus far, I’ve seen no rationalizations or other arguments excusing how it’s a little ghoulish to be profiting while so many are clearly suffering and facing individual and household fiscal cliffs. Instead, we rather blandly accept that the public needs to be served no less by mass market retailers than by, say, grocery and utility services. Failure by the private sector to maintain functioning supply lines (including nonessentials, I suppose) during a crisis would look too much like the appalling mismanagement of the same crisis by local, state, and federal governments. Is it ironic that centralized bureaucracies reveal themselves as incompetent at the very same time they consolidate power? Or more cynically, isn’t it outrageous that they barely even try anymore to address the true needs of the public?

One of the questions I’ve posed unrhetorically is this: when will it finally become undeniably clear that instead of being geared to growth we should instead be managing contraction? I don’t know the precise timing, but the issue will be forced on us sooner or later as a result of radically diminishing return (compared to a century ago, say) on investment (ROI) in the energy sector. In short, we will be pulled back down to earth from the perilous heights we scaled as resources needed to keep industrial civilization creaking along become ever more difficult to obtain. (Maybe we’ll have to start using the term unobtainium from the Avatar movies.) Physical resources are impossible to counterfeit at scale, unlike the bogus enormous increase in the fiat money supply via debt creation. If/when hyperinflation makes us all multimillionaires because everything is grossly overvalued, the absurd paradox of being cash rich yet resource poor ought to wake up some folks.

A Dog’s Life

From my earliest memories growing up, my large, Catholic family kept a series of pets. Most of the time it was a dog, only one at a time, usually a German shepherd. Later on, it was a cat. The pet belonged to no one in particular but to the family as a whole. And because this was before leash laws became commonplace, the dogs had plenty of exercise and range off-leash. As an adult, I’ve never had a dog but often wanted one. What I understand as a nonnegotiable commitment to a dog is not really possible for me. Moreover, I have never lived in a location amenable to the needs of a dog. Yet in my condo building, many of my neighbors keep rather large dogs, who are dutifully trundled outside to a small, enclosed space where they can be let off leash for 10 to 20 minutes every morning and evening to pee and poop (owners often face-planted in their phones during these intervals). Whether the dogs are eventually taken to a park or dog run to socialize with other animals or just be free to roam and play is unknown to me. I don’t witness it.

In rather stark contrast, I was fortunate to spend most of a recent weekend visiting Winged Elm Farm operated by fellow blogger The South Roane Agrarian (a superlative blogger, host, and chef, BTW), and the very first impression upon arrival was being greeted by his three dogs. Rather than being hemmed in by the city and limited by their master’s availability and willingness to grant outdoor time, these amiable dogs were free to move around and be dogs independent of the master. All of their time during my visit was spent outdoors. Of course, they were also tuned in, vigilant to all goings on around the farm and hyper-vigilant to any possibility of food or affection offered by one of the humans. They were introduced to me as “mostly useless,” which was unexpected because, to my way of thinking, all pets are essentially useless (as distinguished from useful or productive). That’s part of their charm. However, it was relayed that the oldest of three had been quite useful in her day corralling farm animal as they were moved from pasture to pasture. Alas, age and infirmity has made her less useful except for a reputed intimidation factor other farm animals still respect. Another dog was described as moderately useful as a ratter. The third enjoyed no encomium and had a habit (slightly unnerving to me) of standing with its muscled body pressed against my legs whenever possible. All three ventured without hesitation or apparent complaint into the rain that persisted most of the weekend.

Aside. With surprisingly superfluous regularity (maybe not so surprising in hindsight), nouns were accompanied by the modifier farm: farm dogs, farm animals, farm truck, farm tools and implements, farm life, etc. Eggs and veggies were farm fresh. Meat and fish were farm sourced, or as was jokingly admitted with respect to the crawfish etouffee we enjoyed for dinner, farm sourced but maybe not this farm.

Further aside. The farm was described as organic, meaning chemicals and unnatural fertilizers are not used and animals are mostly grass fed rather than raised in feed lots or stuck in crates. Indeed, chickens had access to the yard, goats sheep has access to pastures and barns, and pigs had access to the woods where they searched the understory relentlessly for anything remotely edible. The organic quality was reinforced as we sampled directly from the garden and orchards. Each farm product seemed to have a bit of dirt on it, which I ingested without first washing.

On the whole, these dogs enjoy a life on the farm most of us would envy. Their rootedness and sense of belonging to the farm, notwithstanding the occasional, cherished ride in the farm truck, is a condition few of us humans can claim. For instance, my own family, raised in the heart of the American Midwest, has now scattered to all four coasts/boundaries (East, West, North, and South), leaving only one behind in the center. Home may be where we hang our hats, but we don’t belong anywhere in particular anymore, and it’s difficult to say convincingly that any of us belong to that same family from my childhood, either. We live in flux, moving from place to place in search of opportunity, reforming many of our social attachments with each move, some of us forming new families in the process. Of course, this characterization fails to describe all Americans. Many stay their entire lives within, say, 100 miles of their birthplace and keep vital connections with an extended family all situated within one small region. Still, I can’t help but to admire the life provided to those dogs, something now denied to many of us humans.

All Cats are Girls, All Dogs are Boys (redux)

Years ago, I broke with my usual themes and styles to offer a listicle, mostly inanities and hyper-irony, which began as follows:

• All cats are girls, all dogs are boys. Everyone knows this from childhood. Additional discussion is moot.

I’m not a good writer of aphorisms, so I haven’t returned to that brief experiment until now. For inspiration, I’m quoting numerous examples by Caitlin Johnstone, who is a frequent and fantastic writer of aphorisms under the repeated subtitle “Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix.” The long-running theme we share is that we are all being programmed and propagandized continuously through the shaping of narrative by folks with obvious agendas. Johnstone believes we are collectively waking up — as if from a nightmare — to the dark realization that our minds have been colonized (my term) and that a worldwide transformation of consciousness is currently taking place. I don’t quite see it yet, but I’m sympathetic to the possibility that, as in the famous rant from the 1976 movie Network, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

• The essential character relationship of the 1% to the rest of us is predator/prey or strong/weak. Strong predators behave precisely as one would expect.
• Trying to restore peace using the same violent police force whose violence disrupted the peace in the first place is a bit like trying to put out a fire using lighter fluid. The same lighter fluid that was used to start it. (Johnstone)
• Rioting and looting are not constructive responses to society’s ills, but then, neither have various nonviolent forms of protest and dissent been effective at petitioning government for redress of grievance. Packing up and going home merely cedes the field of play to bad actors already stuffing everyone down.
• Believing cold war is no big deal because nuclear war hasn’t happened yet is the same as believing your game of Russian roulette is safe because the gun hasn’t gone off yet. (Johnstone)
• According to the movies, realizing one’s potential is achieved by developing punching/fighting/domination skills sufficient to force your will upon others, which is true for criminals, saints (good guys), men, and women alike.
• Ecocide will be a problem as long as ecocide remains profitable. War will be a problem as long as war remains profitable. Politicians will cater to profit-seeking sociopaths as long as profit determines what drives human behavior. (Johnstone)
• The most influential news outlets in the western world uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, then tell you that Russia and China are bad because they have state media. (Johnstone)
• Wanting Biden because he’s not Trump is the same as wanting cancer because it’s not heart disease. (Johnstone)
• Capitalism will let you starve to death while sitting meters away from food. (Johnstone)

I wish more of them were my own, but the opportunity to choose some of Johnstone’s best was too good to pass up.

Predation

News aggregators such as Yahoo! are known to publish videos seeking help identifying perpetrators of crime caught on camera. There is no one canonical example, but those that pop for me usually depict some young dude mugging and robbing an old woman, presumably for whatever the contents of her purse might be. It’s disheartening to witness (at some remove) common street crime perpetrated so casually. Right, wrong, and one’s position in relation to those categories can’t be so difficult that criminals don’t know the difference. Yet they commit crime anyway. Then it struck me, “why, of course! We’re predators.” More than that, we’re apex predators. Let me explain.

Everything alive eats (and poops). Food for animals is mostly other living things, both plants and other animals. Accordingly, the basic relationship of animals to each another, even the noncarnivorous ones, is predator and prey. Predatory behavior usually occurs across species boundaries for social species but sometimes within. Besides crime videos, one can go online to watch vicariously as predators dispatch their prey. I recall being astounded to see golden eagles snatch goats off the sides of mountains or ravines only to release them from a height sufficient to result in impact death. They aren’t called birds of prey for nothing. If goats in this instance die quickly albeit painfully, the same can’t be said for victims of bears, which are known to pin down their prey and just start eating before the victim is even dead. Not all predators use size advantage, either. Some swarm their victims, others use disproportionate strength or immobilizing poison, and others sting and extract (without killing directly) or burrow and bore into their victims and consume them from inside. Sometimes, as in the insect world, a host organism is used as an incubator for a brood of offspring. Nature evolved a multiplicity of mechanisms and strategies for eating, for survival. Many are absolutely horrific to contemplate, but in a state of nature, they occur without implied moral weight.

It’s different (but then not so different) for humans, who no longer live in a strict state of nature but are instead members of civilized societies. We evolved and developed mechanisms, strategies, and tools to dominate all of nature and have essentially taken over the planet as the most successful of all apex predators — at least temporarily. It’s in our nature to do so, just as a big cat or alligator clamps its jaws on its prey. Billions of fowl, swine, and beef farmed for food production in frankly appalling conditions (thus the need for Ag Gag laws) attest to our callous treatment of other species. But humans have moral, ethical, and legal restraints when it comes to intraspecies predation. Some observe those restraints, others do not. Muggers and purse snatchers occupy middle ground, since killing isn’t necessary to secure food (or money) to survive. Writ large, exploitation of labor by the ownership class is arguably part of that middle ground, too. The main difference is that survival for corporate entities such as Walmart and Amazon (or their multibillionaire owners) is far less precarious than for a coyote stealing chickens out of backyards for its next meal.

Misdirected Violence

My information diet is, like most others, self-curated and biased. As a result, the news that finally makes its way through my filters (meaning that to which I give any attention) is incomplete. This I admit without reservation. However, it’s not only my filters at work. Nearly everyone with something to say, reveal, or withhold regarding civil unrest sparked in the U.S. and diffusing globally has an agenda. Here are some of the things we’re not hearing about but should expect to:

• comparison of peaceful protest to violent protest, by percentage, say, at least until the police show up and things go sideways
• incidence of aldermen, councilmen, mayors, congressmen, and other elected officials who side with protesters
• incidence of police officers who side with protesters, take a knee, and decline to crack heads
• examples of police units on the streets who do not look like they’re equipped like soldiers in a war zone — deployed against civilians with bottles and bricks (mostly)
• incidents where it’s police rioting rather than protesters
• situations where looters are left alone to loot while nearby protesters are harassed and arrested or worse

If the objective of those trying to control the narrative, meaning the MSM, the corpocracy, and municipal, state, and Federal PR offices, is to strike fear in the hearts of Americans as a means of rationalizing and justifying overweening use of state power (authoritarianism), then it makes sense to omit or de-emphasize evidence that protesters are acting on legitimate grievances. Indeed, if other legitimate avenues of petitioning government — you know, 1st Amendment stuff — have been thwarted, then it should be expected that massed citizen dissent might devolve into violence. Group psychology essentially guarantees it.

Such violence may well be misdirected, but that violence is being reflected back at protesters in what can only be described as further cycles of escalation. Misdirection upon misdirection. That is not at all the proper role of civil authority, yet the police have been cast in that role and have been largely compliant. Dystopian fiction in the middle of the 20th century predicted this state of human affairs pretty comprehensively, yet we find ourselves having avoided none of it.

Channeling Contagion

Caveat: rather overlong for me, but I got rolling …

One of the better articles I’ve read about the pandemic is this one by Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate (a publication I’ve never heard of before). It reads as only slightly conspiratorial, purporting to reveal the true motivation for lockdowns and social distancing, namely, so-called herd immunity. If that’s the case, it’s basically a silent admission that no cure, vaccine, or inoculation is forthcoming and the spread of the virus can only be managed modestly until it has essentially raced through the population. Of course, the virus cannot be allowed to simply run its course unimpeded, but available impediments are limited. “Flattening the curve,” or distributing the infection and death rates over time, is the only attainable strategy and objective.

Wedding mathematical and biological insights, as well as the law of mass action in chemistry, into an epidemic model may seem obvious now, but it was novel roughly a century ago. We’re also now inclined, if scientifically oriented and informed, to understand the problem and its potential solutions management in terms of engineering rather than medicine (or maybe in terms of triage and palliation). Global response has also made the pandemic into a political issue as governments obfuscate and conceal true motivations behind their handling (bumbling in the U.S.) of the pandemic. Curiously, the article also mentions financial contagion, which is shaping up to be worse in both severity and duration than the viral pandemic itself.

Everything and Nothing

In the introduction to an article at TomDispatch about anticipated resumption of professional sports currently on hiatus like much of the rest of human activity (economic and otherwise), Tom Engelhardt recalls that to his childhood self, professional sports meant so much and yet so little (alternatively, everything and nothing). This charming aspect of the innocence of childhood continues into adulthood, whether as spectator or participant, as leisure and freedom from threat allow. The article goes on to offer conjecture regarding the effect of reopening professional sports on the fall presidential election. Ugh! Racehorse politics never go out of season. I reject such purely hypothetical analyses, which isn’t the same as not caring about the election. Maybe I’ll wade in after a Democratic nominee is chosen to say that third-party candidates may well have a much larger role to play this time round because we’re again being offered flatly unacceptable options within the two-party single-party system. Until then, phooey on campaign season!

Still, Engelhardt’s remark put me in mind of a blog post I considered fully nine years ago but never got around to writing, namely, how music functions as meaningless abstraction. Pick you passion, I suppose: sports, music (any genre), literature, painting, poetry, dance, cinema and TV, fashion, fitness, nature, house pets, house plants, etc. Inspiration and devotion come in lots of forms, few of which are essential (primary or ontological needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy) yet remain fundamental to who we are and what we want out of life. Accordingly, when one’s passion is stripped away, being left grasping and rootless is quite common. That’s not equivalent to losing a job or loved one (those losses are afflicting many people right now, too), but our shared experience these days with no bars, no restaurants, no sports, no concerts, no school, and no church all add up to no society. We’re atomized, unable to connect and socialize meaningfully, digital substitutes notwithstanding. If a spectator, maybe one goes in search of replacements, which is awfully cold comfort. If a participant, one’s identity is wrapped up in such endeavors; resulting loss of meaning and/or purpose can be devastating.

It would be easy to over-analyze and over-intellectualize what meaningless abstraction means. It’s a trap, so I’ll do my best not to over-indulge. Still, it’s worth observing that as passions are habituated and internalized, their mode of appreciation is transferred from the senses (or sensorium) to the mind or head (as observed here). Coarseness and ugliness are then easily digested, rationalized, and embraced instead of being repulsive as they should be. There’s the paradox: as we grow more “sophisticated” (scare quotes intentional), we also invert and become more base. How else to explain tolerance of increasingly brazen dysfunction, corruption, servitude (e.g., debt), and gaslighting? It also explains the attraction to entertainments such as combat sports (and thug sports such as football and hockey), violent films, professional wrestling (more theater than sport), and online trolling. An instinctual blood lust that accompanies being predators, if not expressed more directly in war, torture, crime, and self-destruction, is sublimated into entertainment. Maybe that’s an escape valve so pressures don’t build up any worse, but that possibility strikes me as rather weak considering just how much damage has already been done.